The California African American Museum in Los Angeles has opened "Willie Birch: Stories To Tell," the first career retrospective of the New Orleans-born artist. The exhibition spans more than five decades of work across multiple mediums and cities.

The show proceeds chronologically, and from the outset it establishes Birch's keen interest in people — Black people especially. The exhibition's organizers present an artist devoted to observing community practices, the ways individuals move through the world, and how past actions inform present ones.

The first galleries cover the 1970s, a decade when Birch seemed amused by patterns of behavior. His work from this period comments on and codifies how people operate within Black traditions and histories.

"Voodoo Series #1" (1978–79), a mixed-media work built on Xerox collage, marries symbols of ancient spiritual and medicinal practices with then-burgeoning household technology. "Passages" (1982) offers a literal rumination on movement across oceans: carved, brown wooden bodies arranged on a painted, water-like surface. The figures echo a second-line parade from Birch's hometown of New Orleans, their faces either serene or portending great danger.

After Birch moved to New York City in 1975, he made "New York City Jazz Series" (1978), a gridded painting of invented symbols, pictograms and hieroglyphs that mimics jazz musical notation and codifies the goings-on of his new environment.

New York dominates the retrospective's second era, when Birch introduced papier-mâché into his technique. Graphite, charcoal and acrylic paint form large-scale New York scenes that read like short stories, while papier-mâché frames extend each work's core ideas. Debossed words and three-dimensional touches supply context to Birch's thinking at the time. "Keeping Up with the Iran-Contra Hearings" (1987) and "Birthday Celebration for Nelson Mandela" (1988) reflect the concerns of New York City's Black community with its leading figures, situating those concerns within the broader national and political forces shaping life in the city.

The wall-hanging works then give way to a third era: life-size figures. Variously hued Black bodies animate the galleries, posed as if telling their own stories. The range runs from smaller, sconce-sized sculptures like "For Alex Haley" (1993) to figures that could fill a room, each lifelike presentation representing a layered aspect of Black existence.

"Memories of the '60s" (1992) anchors this section. A sprawling, intricate quilt of important events from the Civil Rights Movement, centered on the words of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., it rests across the knees of a woman with grayed locs sewing in the final seams. A gold Gye Nyame — an Adinkra symbol that gives praise to God — hangs around her neck. The piece arrests through its gargantuan size and through the simultaneous serenity and gravity it elicits.

"Memories of the '60s" also serves as a threshold, ushering viewers into a larger gallery of Birch's more recent work — a final room that extends the retrospective's arc into the present tense of an artist still compiling stories to tell.